Ressler, a thousand miles west, listens to the blackfella go on to sing, in resonant bass, the great ascent up Jacob's Ladder. Every rung — now the steps of the four nucleotides up the spiral DNA staircase — goes higher and higher. On the darkened, ex-army-barracks lawn, gathering strength for the work he owes the world, a physiological trick sweeps over Ressler. His peace turns to a sadness so overpowering that, before he can interpret it, tears seep out his eyes on underground springs. Avuncular defective lachrymal, until this moment happily masked, flushed by the deep voice, the simplicity of the tune, the hopeless hope of words in a world where the stadium colonnade declares itself a safe radiation haven, or just this absolute, still, summer night in a featureless town. Spontaneous twitch of gland for a race capable of grabbing the next rung while simultaneously leaping for the beloved brink. Or purely somatic epiphenomenon: Robeson hits a note, springs a chord sequence that triggers solute; everything else lies outside measure. Deeply enfolded, the tune attaches to the night's lateness, and suddenly the song is real. Ah! sometimes it causes me to wonder. Sometimes.
There on the lawn, the eve before uncovering the precise, testable tape that will change the way life conceives itself, he feels the first seduction of music, his own pitiful compulsion for forward motion, the insistence that we sing ourselves over into a further place. All the while the runaway slave's son intones:
We are climbing Jacob's Ladder We are climbing Jacob's Ladder We are climbing Jacob's Ladder We're soldiers of the Cross.
As rearguard action, Ressler runs through the lexical combinations biology reserves for this five-letter combination: cross stain, hair cross, Ranvier's cross, crossbreed, cross-firing, crossing over, cross matching, sensory crossway.
Every rung goes higher and higher Every rung goes higher and higher Every rung goes higher and higher We're soldiers of the Cross.
To this cross list, he adds the crucial test cross, the only way to tell how he and the bass are related, to find the miscegenation harbored in their common ancestor, to trace the defective ducts. Then he hits on it, the mark, the label for the spiritual's crucifix, the deep, reluctant cross Robeson soldiers: anatomical term. Crux of the heart.
Today in History
Assisted by accident, I was out of the starting block. Given the locus — a year to peg him and a special field — I retrieved everything the limited print trail held about Dr. Ressler. Three days after coming across the magazine photo, I turned up two more citations: the Science Midwest abstracts for the same year, and the coau-thored article in Journal of Molecular Biology that brought the young man his first attention. I even traced, through the dense, preserved, late-fifties paperwork, his department's involvement in varied researches as molecular genetics unfolded. One colleague made important refinements in electron microscopy. Another developed a cheap way to measure cytoplasmic protein. A third cropped the copious shady old genealogical trees beloved of textbooks.
To have been a virgin post-doc then! I exhumed the Watson-Crick paper that had touched off the wholesale gold rush. The primary sources still exhale the atmosphere of intellectual dizziness, the articles thick with a sense that someone would soon crack the complete caper and seize the ne plus ultra of the research world, the riddle of life. I knew that every era since Anaxi-mander and his vital moisture has tried to explain the ultimate contradiction: living matter. But even a hurried review of Ressler's contemporaries brought home the shock: my lifetime has seen the breakthrough moment, the first physical theory of all life grounded at entry level.
Each article, every retraction and revision recorded the heat of the exploding field. I pored over the background material — busman's holidays at the main branch — coming to know Dr. Ressler weeks before I made his acquaintance, if only a Ressler decades younger than the one I was sent to discover. How must it have felt, at twenty-five, talented but untested, to live at the same hour, perhaps even arm's length from the finishing touch, the final transcription — the first organism to explain its own axioms?
Half of what I made out about the twenty-five-year-old scientist was pure projection. I began to feel I had not lived up to my own intellect, that I'd been born too late, had taken a wrong turn, had lost my own chance to turn up the edge of the real, discover something, something hard. This child scientist, desperate with ability, somehow reduced to full-scale adult withdrawal, night shift labor, by something not explained in the literature: here was my own irreversible missed hour.
The race for the genetic code must have been wonderful torture for one of Dr. Ressler's abilities. By 1957, the search to describe all living tissue in molecular principles was halfway to unmitigated solution. The pace of revelations staggers even one habituated to permanent acceleration. Consensus that DNA was the genetic carrier had been reached only a few years before Ressler arrived in Illinois. Its structure had fallen only four years earlier. In 1957, speculation about how the giant molecule encoded heredity became open game for theoreticians. The field is littered with articles by physicists, chemists, and other inflamed amateurs. Generations of patient fly-counters had done the legwork. The mid-fifties were set for breakout, the rush of synthesizing postulates. He must have sensed that this anarchical phase would pass quickly, perhaps in months. The prize was bare, exposed for the plucking at the top of the nucleic stair.
But something else motivates the euphoric articles, something more than self-aggrandizement, more than the desire to cap the ancient monument and book passage to Stockholm, that freezing, pristine Valhalla. The compulsion to find the pattern of living translation — the way a simple, self-duplicating string of four letters inscribes an entire living being — is built into every infant who has ever learned a word, put a phrase together, discovered that phonemes might speak.
As the journal evidence accumulated, it sucked me into the craze of crosswords, pull of punch lines, addiction to anagrams, nudge of numerology, suspense of magic squares. I felt the fresh Ph.D.'s suspicion that beneath the congenital complexity of human affairs runs a generating formula so simple and elegant that redemption depended on uncovering it. Once lifting the veil and glimpsing the underlying plan, Ressler would never again surrender its attempted recovery. The desire surpassed that for food, sex, even bedtime stories, worth pursuing with convert's zeal, with the singleness of a monastic, a lost substance abuser, a true habitue: the siege of concealed meaning.